IET Open House 2018

Drones4Good were invited to this year's Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) Open House Event, #IETOpenHouse. The venue was Savoy Place in London and you can just see our stand in the right of the picture above. We took the 3D printer and quadcopter simulator with the Leap Motion controller to allow the little ones to fly the drone around the Lima landscape and collect Pokemon. The analogy being that collecting Pokemon is a search and rescue task, so they got prizes for coming up with uses for drones and 3D printing technology beyond the usual military uses. The picture above was taken at the very end when it had calmed down a bit.

Many hands make quad work...

There's Pikachu about to be rescued.

I think the youngest budding quadcopter pilot we had was only 4 years old. Her mum was quite impressed that, in a couple of minutes, she went from waving her hands about randomly to making the link between the movements of her hand and what the quadcopter was doing to go and hunt Pokemon. The three in the picture below are a bit older.

I had lots of interesting conversations with people about drones and 3D printing, but the best one has to be the following: "dinosaurs were turned into oil, which is used to make plastic, which you're using to 3D print dinosaurs again". It's a fantastic piece of logical reasoning if we ignore the fact that we're printing in PLA.

Now that it's all over, how do we measure whether the event was a success? I took a before and after shot of all our give-away prizes.



I had 98 prizes at the start and 32 at the end so that means we must have had 66 quadcopter fliers, not allowing for the half dozen or so 3D prints we did during the event. It's surprising this time around that the butterfly rings weren't as popular as at the Big Bang Fair, but most people wanted a dinosaur.

You might just be able to see from the first picture that we were opposite the Micro:Bit Foundation stand. They had lots of robots and other micro:bit inspired devices and games, so I managed to have a quick chat with them about a micro:bit drone. I think it's up to me to finish my prototype now as it's a bit of a technological leap beyond a simple wheeled robot. I've got a few new ideas about making a drone testing frame now though. That's the key component you need if you want to get the students programming flight controller code.

Here's our stand. You can just see the little guy in grey in the centre of the screen flying the quadcopter.

This is the Micro:Bit stand.

Here are some of the other stands after the event ended, this was full of people earlier.

The view along the length of the room - our stand is at the far end, round the corner on the left.

Finally, we found out why they call it the "Riverside Room". After the event ended, they opened up the balcony doors and let us go outside. The view's not half bad:

That's London out there. This image was taken using a handheld RunCam drone camera and stitched together from the 1080p video using Microsoft's Image Composite Editor.

Thank you to Elpida for inviting us to this event and also to our two helpers Bin (@BINCHI16) and Bonnie (@bonnie_0000), as we couldn't have done it without you.

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